I know quite a bit about Flock, having been intimately involved in the process of evicting it from our municipality, and I don't think the distinction you're trying to draw here is meaningful. Flock will say they provide a service, one avidly sought by the actual owners of the data, to generate analysis based on that data.

They're contractually forbidden from "selling their access to it" to arbitrary parties; they can share data only with the consent of their customers, almost all of whom actively want that data shared --- this is a very rare case of a data collection product where that's actually the case.

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shye an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Flock's facilitation of data-sharing is a huge part of their value proposition over other cameras, and why their customers buy from them over their competitors.

As such, even if they can contract it such that they are not legally responsible for such use, they are very much knowingly facilitating it. If this was physical goods, rather than data, they would probably been as responsible as their customers.

	▲	tptacek 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I've read our contract. I know what it says. This isn't an abstraction. They can do lots of things. What they actually do is not data brokerage under California Law, at least not that I can tell.

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dureuill 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except their customer's data isn't actually theirs: OP requested their private data to be deleted from the system. So OP expressed a clear intent for their data not to be used by Flock's customer. We could say that the data thus becomes abusively retained on these systems. As a result, IF Flock has the technical means of performing the requested data deletion, it should be compelled to perform it.

This is the same situation as a web hosting provider: if it is communicated to them that one of their customers uses their service to host illegal content, then it becomes the web hosting provider's responsibility to remove that content.

Reasonable technical feasibility for the service provider is key here, but it can be argued since the data can apparently be shared in ways that identify OP.

Probably not how the law currently works (don't know, not a lawyer), but I guess it should, as otherwise it allows creating a platform that shares abusively retained data without any reasonable recourse for the subjects of this data to remove the data from the platform.

	▲	tptacek 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do not believe this is how the law works. Two totally different regimes.